Why does slapping a BlackBerry-style micro Qwerty keyboard make a smartphone professional? It doesn't, but vendors continue to pitch handsets that way, the latest being LG.
To whit, the Optimus Pro, a standard Qwerty canbybar phone, all done up in black and running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The CPU is clocked at 800MHz, and the …

COMMENTS

I love full QWERTY keyboards

I have an LG Optimus S Android phone which I like very much, except for one thing: I've come to despise the touchscreen keyboards, no matter whether in portrait of landscape orientation. I have a neurological condition called "Essential Tremor" which causes my fingers to shake a bit and I am forever hitting the wrong key (because the keys are too close together) or hitting a key multiple time resulting in mis-spelling of words. I seldom had that problem with either the Blackberry or Motorola Q I once had, simply because of the physical keys on the keyboard if there were some way of reducing the touch-screen sensitivity that might help, but neither the Froyo keyboard nor the backported Gingerbread keyboard possess this feature. I really don't give a crap if the phone is "professional" or not. If Sprint offers it in the future, I'm getting one!

Pre 4?

This device is all I wanted from HP/(Palm). But I suppose I will have to get it from LG instead. My Nexus One has freed me from the Pre 2 sliding mechanism but at the cost of too much precision.

Voice-to-text and touch screen keyboards are no match for people's names and non-dictionary word domains; progress has been made, yes, but I think the physical keyboard still rules on these smallish devices.